After JonBenet's death, a few journalists and commentators went so far as to suggest that her tricked-up pageant look could have been the reason for her murder. Perhaps, they said, she had become the target of a pedophile who lurked around pageants. "The way people were talking, you would have thought we were all going to be murdered by child molesters," says Brooke Breedwell, who was 7 at the time. A recent graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Breedwell was one of the country's most famous child contestants during the JonBenet era. For Breedwell, JonBenet's murder was more than a tragedy  it was a little girl's worst nightmare. "I remember thinking when she got killed, I was going to get killed. I was convinced it was a serial killer going after pageant girls. I would hide under my covers, terrified, at night."

Stacy Dittrich, a former detective in Ashland, OH, who specialized in sex crimes and who is now a true-crime author and media analyst, says, "I found, in the course of my work, pedophiles who had gone to great lengths to obtain videos of little girls walking around provocatively, pulling their shirts down off their shoulders and smiling at the camera." Even though Dittrich never worked on a case in which a pedophile stalked a child from a pageant, she did have experience with pedophiles who lurked at football games to snap pictures of young kids. "I arrested one guy who sat at his window and took photographs of the neighborhood girls playing in a sprinkler," she remembers. "When I see pageants on TV, I think, These are the types of videos those pedophiles would watch." While Dittrich isn't totally against pageants, she thinks airing them on television is irresponsible: "On TV, they are not only giving out the names of these children, but they also tell you what towns these little girls live in," she says. "It would not be difficult whatsoever for an obsessive pedophile to track these children down."

There is scant documented evidence to suggest that pageants put little girls in danger, yet many psychologists believe that developmental and emotional problems can stem from the pressure and value system that pageants embody. A 2007 report issued by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls claims that parents who put their daughters in pageants can contribute "in very direct and concrete ways" to "the precocious sexualization" of their daughters. "These pageant girls are taught from a very early age that what is most critically important in life is their physical appearance along with a superficial and eroticized charm. They are presented in a hypersexualized manner that is completely inappropriate to their ages," says Mary E. Doheny, Ph.D., of the Family Institute at Northwestern University. Doheny says, "Also, for the mothers, their whole focus is imparting the critical importance of physical beauty, and along with that is the mothers' implicit criticism of their girls' own unembellished beauty. They are always applying makeup to their girls' faces, dressing them up, and dyeing their hair. They are hypervigilant about diet and posture. And so the message these little girls take away is that natural beauty isn't enough  that their self-esteem and sense of self-worth only comes from being the most attractive girl in the room, not from being smart or resourceful or tough or creative."

"These little girls are being trained to look and act like sexual bait," says Nancy Irwin, Psy.D., a Los Angelesbased psychotherapist who specializes in working with sexually abused clients, particularly teenage girls. "And what's really disturbing is that so many of these girls seem to be tools of their mothers, who think this is the way for the girls to get fame and attention." Raised in Atlanta, Irwin herself competed in pageants when she was a teenager and a young adult. "I did them in hopes of getting college scholarship money. I worry that these girls are just doing it because they are being ordered to do it  and if they don't win, many times their mothers let them have it," she says.

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